When Hamilton hastily entered the room, Annie, frightened and helpless,
knelt beside her mistress, chafing her hands. On the opposite side of
the couch Kimberly, greatly disturbed, looked up with relief.
Taking a chair at her side, the doctor lifted Alice's arm, took her
pulse and sat for some time in silence watching her faint and irregular
respiration.
He turned after a moment to Kimberly to learn the slight details of the
attack, and listening, retracted the lids of Alice's eyes and examined
the pupils. Reflecting again in silence, he turned her head gently from
side to side and afterward lifted her arms one after the other to let
them fall back beside her on the couch.
Even these slight efforts to obtain some knowledge of Alice's condition
seemed to Kimberly disquieting and filled him with apprehension. The
doctor turned to Annie. "Has your mistress ever had an experience like
this before, Annie?"
"No, doctor, never. She has never been in this way before."
Imogene came hurrying upstairs with Dolly to learn of Alice's condition.
They looked upon her unconsciousness with fear and asked whispered
questions that intensified Kimberly's uneasiness.
"Do you think we could take her home, doctor?" asked Annie, timidly.
The doctor paused. "I don't think we will try it to-night, Annie. It
is quite possible for her to remain here, isn't it?" he asked, looking
at Dolly and Kimberly.
"Certainly," returned Dolly. "I will stay. Alice can have these rooms
and I will take the blue rooms connecting."
"Then put your mistress to bed at once," said Hamilton to Annie.
"And telephone home, Annie," suggested Dolly, "for whatever you need. I
will see the housekeeper right away about the linen."
Kimberly listened to the concise directions of the doctor for immediate
measures of relief and followed him mechanically into the hall. Only
one thought came out of the strange confusion--Alice was at least under
his roof and in his mother's room.
When he returned with the doctor the lights were low and Alice lay with
her head pillowed on her loosened hair. The maid and Dolly had hastened
away to complete their arrangements for the emergency and for a few
moments the two men were alone with their charge.
"Doctor, what do you make of this?" demanded Kimberly.
Hamilton, without taking his eyes from the sick woman, answered
thoughtfully: "I can hardly tell until I get at something of the
underlying cause. Bryson will be here in a moment. We will hear what he
has to say."
Doctor Bryson appeared almost on the word. Hamilton made way for him at
Alice's side and the two conferred in an undertone.
Bryson asked many questions of Hamilton and calling for a candle
retracted Alice's eyelids to examine the pupils for reaction to the
light. The two doctors lost not an unnecessary moment in deliberation.
Consulting rapidly together, powerful restoratives were at once prepared
and administered through the circulation.
Reduced to external efforts to strengthen the vital functions the two
medical men worked as nurses and left nothing undone to overcome the
alarming situation. Then for an hour they watched together, closely,
the character and frequency of Alice's pulse and breathing.
To Kimberly the conferences of the two men seemed unending. Sometimes
they left the room and were gone a long time. He walked to a window to
relieve his suspense. Through the open sash came the suppressed hum of
motors as the cars, parked below the stables, moved up the hill to
receive departing guests and made their way down the long, dark avenue
to the highway.
On the eastern horizon a dull gray streak crossed a mirror that lay in
the darkness below. Kimberly had to look twice to convince himself that
the summer night was already waning.
Annie came into the room and, he was vaguely conscious, was aiding the
doctors in a painstaking examination of their patient. Through delicacy
Kimberly withdrew, as they persistently questioned the maid in the hope
of obtaining the much-needed information concerning her mistress's
previous condition; for what Annie could not supply of this they knew
they must work without.
Plunged in the gloom of his apprehensions, he saw the doctors coming
down the hall toward him and stopped them. "Speak before me," he said
with an appeal that was a command. "You both know what I have at
stake."
The three retired to the library and Kimberly listened attentively to
every phase of the discussion between the two master clinicians as they
laid their observations before him. The coma was undisguisedly a
serious matter. It seemed to them already ingravescent and, taken in
connection with the other symptoms, was even ominous. The two men,
without a satisfactory history, and without a hope of obtaining one from
the only available source--the suffering woman herself--discussed the
case from every side, only to return unwillingly to the conclusion to
which everything pointed--that a cerebral lesion underlay the attack.
Their words sent a chill to Kimberly's heart. But the lines of defence
were mapped out with speed and precision; a third eminent man, an
authority on the brain, was to be sent for at once. Nurses, equal almost
in themselves to good practitioners, were to be called in, and finally
Hamilton and Bryson arranged that either one or the other should be at
the sick-bed every instant to catch a possible moment of consciousness.
Hamilton himself returned to his patient. Bryson at the telephone took
up the matter of summoning aid from town, and when he had done threw
himself down for a few hours' sleep. Kimberly followed Hamilton and
returned to Alice's side. He saw as he bent over her how the expression
of her face had changed. It was drawn with a profound suffering.
Kimberly sitting noiselessly down took her hand, waiting to be the first
to greet her when she should open her eyes.
All Second Lake knew within a day or two of Alice's critical illness.
The third doctor had come in the morning and he remained for several
days.
Hamilton questioned Annie repeatedly during the period of consultations.
"Try to think, Annie," he said once, "has your mistress never at any
time complained of her head?"
"Indeed, sir, I cannot remember. She never complained about herself at
all. Stop, sir, she did last summer, too--what am I thinking of? I am
so confused. She had a fall one night, sir. I found her in her
dressing-room unconscious. Oh, she was very sick that night. She told
me that she had fallen and her head had struck the table--the back of
her head. For days she suffered terribly. Could it have been that, do
you think?"
"Put your hand to the place on your head where she complained the pain
was."
"How did she happen," Hamilton continued, when Annie had indicated the
region, "to fall backward in her own room, Annie?"
"She never told me, doctor. I asked her but I can't remember what she
said. It was the night before Mr. MacBirney left Cedar Lodge."
The doctors spent fruitless days in their efforts to overcome the
unconsciousness. There was no longer any uncertainty as to the seat of
the trouble. It lay in the brain itself and defied every attempt to
relieve it. Even a momentary interval of reason was denied to the dumb
sufferer.
Kimberly, on the evening of the third day, had summoned his medical
advisers to his own room and asked the result of their consultation.
The frail and eminent man whom Hamilton and Bryson had brought from town
told Kimberly the story. He could grasp only the salient points of what
the specialist said: That in a coma such as they faced it was the
diagnosis of the underlying conditions that was always important. That
this was often difficult; sometimes, as now, impossible. That at times
they encountered, as now, a case so obscure as to defy the resources of
clinical medicine. Kimberly asked them their judgment as to the issue;
the prognosis, they could only tell him, was doubtful, depending wholly
upon the gravity of the apoplectic injury.
The Kimberly family rose to the emergency. Aware of the crisis that had
come, through Alice, into Robert's life, Imogene and Dolly, on hand day
and night, were mother and sister to him and to her. Nowhere in the
situation was there any failure or weakening of support.
Hamilton, undismayed in the face of the physical catastrophe he had been
called upon so unexpectedly to retrieve, and painfully aware of what the
issue meant to his near and dear friend, never for an instant relaxed
his efforts.
Seconded by his nurses, reinforced by his counsel and strengthened by
Bryson's close co-operation, Hamilton faced the discouragement steadily,
knowing only too well that the responsibility must rest, in the end, on
him alone.
Absorbed, vigilant, tireless--pouring the reserve energy of years into
the sustained struggle of the sleepless days and nights--he strove with
every resource of his skill and watched unremittingly for an instant's
abatement of the deadly lethargy that was crushing the vitality of the
delicate woman before him.
Kimberly, following the slightest details of the sick-room hours, spent
the day and the night at the bedside or in pacing the long hall. If he
slept it was for an hour and after leaving orders to summon him
instantly if Alice woke. They who cared for her knew what he meant by
"waking." They knew how long and mutely, sometimes in the day,
sometimes in the silence of the night, he watched her face for one
returning instant of reason.
They knew how when hope burned low in every other eye it shone always
steadily in his. The rising of the sun and its setting meant to him
only another day of hope, another night of hope for her; every concern
had passed from him except that which was centered in the fight for her
life.
Considerate as he was to those about him they feared him, and his
instinctive authority made itself felt more keenly in his silence than
in his words. The heavy features, the stubborn brow, the slow, steady
look became intensified in the long, taciturn vigil. Every day Dolly
walked with him and talked with him. She made a bond between him and
the world; but she saw how little the world meant when danger came
between him and the woman he loved.
One evening the nurses told him that Alice was better. They hoped for a
return of consciousness and he sat all night waiting for the precious
instant. The next day while he slept, wearied and heartsick, Alice
sank. For ten minutes those about her endured a breathless, ageing
suspense that sapped their energy and strength, until it was known that
the doctor had won the fight and the weary heart had returned to its
faint and labored beat. They told Kimberly nothing of it. When he
awoke he still thought she was better.
When he came into the room he was so hopeful that he bent over her and
fondly called her name. To his consternation and delight her eyes opened
at the sound of his voice; it seemed as if she were about to speak.
Then her eyes closed again and she lay still. The incident electrified
him and he spoke hopefully of it for hours. At midnight he sent
Hamilton away, saying he himself was fresh and would be on duty with the
nurse until daylight.
The air was sultry. Toward morning a thunder-storm broke violently.
Kimberly walked out into the hall to throw the belvedere doors open to
the fresh air. As he turned to go back, his heart stopped beating. In
the gloom of the darkened gallery a slender, white figure came from the
open door of the sick-room and Kimberly saw Alice, with outstretched
hands, walking uncertainly toward him. He stood quite still and taking
her hands gently as they touched his own he murmured her name.
"Alice! What is it, darling?" She opened her eyes. Their vacancy
pierced his heart.
"Baby is crying," she faltered; "I hear my baby. Walter." Her hands
groped pitifully within his own. "Walter! Let me go to her!"
She tried to go on but Kimberly restrained and held her for a moment
trembling in his arms. "Come with me," he said, leading her slowly back
to her pillow. "Let us go to her together."